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A high can make a regression model look impressively accurate — but this number can be deceptive. If you want to understand why a high is not always a sign of a good model, read on! In the post, Learning Data Science: Modelling Basics, we built a simple model to predict income from age. R Continue reading "Learning Data Science: Why a High R^2 Can Be Misleading"
Have you ever looked at a freshly plotted scatter plot and immediately thought, Ah, this is clearly a logarithmic curve with some heteroskedastic noise, without running a single line of modeling code? How do you do that? You don t perform gradient descent in your head. You use your intuition! As an experienced data scientist, you Continue reading "The Magic of In-Context Learning (ICL): When Your…
Remember our journey so far? We started with simple Markov chains showing how statistical word prediction works, then dove into the core concepts of word embeddings, self-attention, and next word prediction. Now, it s time for the grand finale: if you want to build your own working transformer language model in R, read on! You will Continue reading "Building Your Own Mini-ChatGPT with R: From…
It’s a widely accepted notion that money influences happiness, a concept famously associated with Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who purportedly demonstrated that emotional wellbeing increases with income but plateaus beyond an annual threshold of about $75,000. This idea has permeated both academic circles and popular media, reinforcing the belief that there’s a direct correlation between…
In an era where artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly permeating various aspects of our lives, the academic world is also faced with the challenge of dealing with this rapid technological development. This is particularly true regarding final theses and term papers, raising the question of how we, as educational institutions, should handle the use of Continue reading "Artificial…
In the realm of business and leadership, one statistical phenomenon often goes unrecognized yet significantly influences our understanding of performance and success. This is the concept of reversion to the mean (also called regression to the mean). This seemingly simple statistical occurrence can profoundly impact how we perceive management strategies, leadership effectiveness, and even the…
The geopolitics of the Middle East has always been complex, with its share of conflicts and political unrest. Numerous theories have been proposed to dissect the underpinnings of the region s political instability. One such theory, known as the Youth Bulge Theory, asserts that a high proportion of young people within a population can lead to Continue reading "The Forgotten Factor in the Middle…
Election polls play a crucial role in predicting the outcome of elections and shaping public opinion. However, it s important to understand that the results of any single poll should be taken with a grain of salt. Many polls only ask about 1,000 people about their political preferences, which is quite small in comparison to the Continue reading "Confidence Intervals in Election Polling:…
Weather and climate are words often used interchangeably in casual conversations. But when a chilly summer breeze sweeps through in July, or when unexpected rains dampen our winter holidays, the age-old debate resurfaces: Is climate change even real? If you want to dive deep into the fascinating realm of chaotic systems to unravel this enigma Continue reading "Is this still Weather or is it…
The stock market is one of the most complex systems we know about. Millions of intelligent, highly competitive people (and increasingly AIs) try to outwit each other to earn as much money as possible. In this post we build a simulation where little agents employ different trading strategies on an artificial stock market to replicate Continue reading "Can a Simple Multi-Agent Model Replicate…